by Jason Elliot
‘Eighty-seven isn’t a bad innings, if you think about it. I do have trouble with opening things, which is the worst aspect of getting old, but other than that everything seems to be working.’ A gentle smile comes over her gaunt features. ‘You must enjoy your youth while you have it. Did I tell you the president of Naronda offered me a state funeral? I don’t suppose one can take him up on it. He was a child when we all had to leave but it seems he never forgot the constitution I drafted rather in his favour.’
‘I trust you’ll keep him waiting,’ I said.
We chat for a while and, postponing the inevitable, catch up on personal news. Then she puts her glass gently onto the small table between us. Her cheeks and the skin beneath her eyes droop noticeably downwards and give her a bloodhound’s perpetually sad look of enquiry. But the clear grey steely quality of her gaze remains unchanged, and now her eyes fall undistractedly on me.
‘But we have more important things to talk about. Tell me.’
I tell every detail of my encounter with Seethrough, the operation he’s proposed and the decision I’ll soon be forced to make. The Baroness listens intently, and when I’ve told her everything, she nods gravely and gazes towards the window, reciting in a quiet voice,
‘Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.’
‘Your memory always astonishes me,’ I say.
‘In our day your father and I had to memorise everything before a mission. He had the advantage of perfect French – not like me. I shall never forget the occasion when he asked a German soldier for directions. We were somewhere in the Vosges. The soldier was perfectly civil, but of course he didn’t know our guns were pointed at him in our pockets. If he’d spoken to me, we would’ve had it. I came from Section D and I don’t suppose my Arabic would have got us very far.’
‘Section D?’
‘Did I say that? It’s such a long time ago now. I don’t suppose St Ermin’s even exists any longer. But your father was a brave man. And a patriot, though he would never admit it. After the Blitz his attitude towards the Germans changed. I don’t suppose he ever forgave them, but he never let revenge get in the way. You must above all do the same.’
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ I say, which is untrue.
‘But you must be prepared. Perhaps you know the story of Ali and the knight? Rumi tells it in the Mathnawi.’
I haven’t heard it, though I know of the reverence in which the famous poet is held in the Persian-speaking world. It’s an odd moment to be recounting an eastern fable, but the Baroness always has her reasons.
‘I’ll tell you, but then we must have some lunch.’ She studies the backs of her hands thoughtfully for a moment, then clasps them neatly together and lets them come to rest on her lap.
‘You know that the fourth caliph, Ali, was said to have been a courageous fighter as well as a political leader – not like today’s, I need hardly say,’ she snorts. ‘Well. Ali is on the battlefield and engages a Christian knight. They fight, and the Christian falls to the ground. Ali is about to kill him when the knight, in a final act of defiance, spits in his face. But instead of lopping off his head, Ali sheathes his sword, and lets the knight go free. Now, the knight is a bit surprised by this and asks why on earth he didn’t kill him when he had the chance. “Because if I’d killed you at that moment,” says the great warrior, “it would have been from anger, and against the principles of war.” The knight is so impressed he converts to Islam. It’s a good story, and of course the Shi’a love it.’ The Baroness sighs. ‘The man who strives for freedom doesn’t allow himself to be provoked, even in the heat of battle. At least that’s how I understand it. Freedom. You must strive for the same thing.’ She pauses. ‘Things will happen quickly now that they’ve found a role for you. It suits our purpose, and you must play the part.’
‘You said you’d arrange a context for me. I won’t ask how you managed it.’
She doesn’t rise to this but smiles benignly. This frail old woman has succeeded in having me recruited to the Secret Intelligence Service for a purpose unknown even to the Service itself.
‘You will jump aboard and must be prepared for the journey. When you know more, contact me in the usual way. In the meantime I shall watch, and pray.’
She says nothing more, but with a simple gesture indicates it’s time to move to the coffee room, as the dining room is misleadingly called. We walk down the carpeted stairs in silence, and a jacketed member of staff greets us with a deferential bow and shows us to a table. Two menus are produced, though no prices appear on the one I’m given.
I look out of the window. From it I can just see the Duke of York’s Monument and coated figures scurrying past the shrapnel-scarred statues in Waterloo Place. I wonder how many of them have undertaken work about which they can speak to no one, how they have managed the burden of secrecy, and how they have mastered the division in one’s life that comes with a double task.
As if from afar I hear the voice of my hostess. I’m reminded that her presence is a comfort, even though we hardly talk. A wine list is in her hand and she’s peering at me over her glasses.
‘Can we manage a bottle? There’s a Montrachet that’ll go very well with the sole.’
I nod enthusiastically, but my thoughts are somewhere else. I’m remembering how the plastic sheeting on the windows of the house in Kabul used to balloon inwards whenever there was a detonation in the city, and how the whole house used to shake when a Taliban rocket landed nearby, and how rich I felt just to be alive afterwards.
I’m haunted by the prospect of returning to Afghanistan, a country that has left its mark on me like no other. There’s a discovery waiting for me there, and the answer to a secret that I can mention to no one except the Baroness. I’m not sure I’m ready for it. The Baroness long ago taught us the power of a single thought: that in the Network we are never alone. There are always others among its members in similar or more difficult situations, suffering or struggling with the same situations, unable to reveal their true purpose to the world, and this know-ledge has often come to my aid, as it does now.
‘My dear boy,’ I hear her say, ‘you’re miles away.’
I make the second journey after the agreed interval of a week, the following Sunday. Two hours after leaving home with Gerhardt I’m crossing the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge, trying to decide whether the building looming ahead of me on the left is ugly or not. It still looks brand new, though I wonder how its clean and angular lines will eventually age.
I park in Kennington Lane. Now that Gerhardt is at rest, I can smell the transmission fluid burning off the hot manifold. With a few minutes to spare, I take the opportunity to check the fluid level, to see how much poor Gerhardt has leaked on the way. It isn’t good. It’s dropped considerably, and the dark liquid streaks all the way from the torque converter to the rear silencer. I feel a pang of regret that I can’t afford a new transmission, then remember how old Gerhardt is. Replacing his transmission is akin to giving a heart transplant to an elderly man. Much in life, I reflect gloomily, simply isn’t solvable.
At midday I walk through the doors of Number 85 Albert Embankment, and enter the lobby. The place has a stripped-down and anonymous look with the smooth flat colours of a modern hotel, and there is everywhere a slightly greenish hue, cast by the triple-glazed glass of the windows. I announce myself at the reception area, which is overseen by an unexpectedly cheerful pair of young women.
‘Plato to see Macavity,’ I say.
One of the women picks up a handset, passes on the names and motions me, as might a hotel receptionist, to a black sofa opposite, where I wait next to an imitation Monstera deliciosa. Seethrough appears a few minutes later from behind the futuristic door system that stretches across the far side of the entrance lobby, and comes up to me. He’s dressed in a charcoal mohair suit, one of his Savile Row shirts with a swept-back collar and antique garnet cufflink
s, and a grey silk tie. An identity card hangs from his neck, bearing his photograph but no name. Beside his image is what looks like a globe surrounded by yellow lightning bolts. He sees me looking at it.
‘Now, now,’ he says, tucking the card into his breast pocket. We shake hands and he looks me up and down approvingly.
‘You clean up quite well,’ he says.
‘Thank you. New shirt?’
‘Yes. Had it made in Italy. Little place off Piazza Navona,’ he replies with a knowing grin, correctly locating my tailor in Rome. I’m not sure if I’m reassured by this detail. He must have had someone search my credit card records since our meeting a week earlier. At least it means he listens to everything I say.
‘Shall we? I need your phone first.’ No one, he explains, is allowed a mobile phone inside the main building.
He hands it to the security guard, who gives me a receipt like a raffle ticket.
‘Right. Follow me and don’t even think of wandering off,’ he says. ‘And by the way, you never run in this place. Whatever happens, you never run.’ We walk to the doors, where he passes his card through a reader and enters a number on a keypad. A door slides open, he goes through, it closes again, and he repeats the process from behind a second door on the far side, allowing me to enter. I’m reminded of French high street banks where the customer is isolated for a few moments in a glassy pod before being able to escape. Then the door in front of me slides aside and I join Seethrough in a tall and spacious inner courtyard with tropical-looking plants overhanging a cream-coloured marble floor. There are broad corridors radiating from a pair of central lift shafts. Kew Gardens, I’m thinking, meets Terence Conran. The plants are plastic.
Seethrough watches my reaction. ‘Welcome to Babylon-on-Thames.’ He grins. He’s visibly proud of his workplace. We take the lift to an upper floor, where the pale marble turns to grey floor tiles. Halfway along an anonymous-looking corridor we come to an empty briefing room identified by a letter and a number. Seethrough offers me a chair at a large oval table with expensive veneer, from which the cables of two slim computer monitors and a pair of complicated-looking telephones run into plugs recessed into the floor. He picks up a handset and says, ‘Ready now,’ and a few minutes later we’re joined by a woman carrying a handful of variously coloured files.
We sit down and Seethrough ignores me for a few minutes as he types at a keyboard.
‘What’s the reg on your car?’ he asks and types it in. ‘Look at that.’ He grins again. ‘We’ve got you on camera 150 times since you left home.’ His eyes are glued to the screen. ‘You’re actually speeding in this one. Eighty-two miles an hour. I didn’t know your Unimog could go that fast. What were you doing in Amesbury?’
‘Petrol,’ I say. ‘And it’s not a Unimog.’
He peers more closely at the screen, and his fingers tap and scroll at the keyboard.
‘You bought thirty-five pounds of four-star. And a Mars bar. Bloody clever, this point of sale stuff,’ he mutters, then looks up. His assistant is standing beside him.
‘Sorry. This is Stella,’ he says. ‘Inside joke.’ She’s about fifty, slim and slightly built, and has a gaunt sad-looking face with large dark eyes. She puts the files on the table, glances at me and utters a timid hello. Then she leaves the room.
‘Right, let’s take care of the paperwork,’ he says, opening a Manilla file and pushing it towards me. A document marked top secret in big red letters glares back. It’s a copy of the best bits of the Official Secrets Act.
‘Haven’t I already signed this?’ I ask.
‘Yes, but it’s got a bit more draconian since then, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘Now it authorises us to kill you and sell your children.’
I let him know with a look that this isn’t a good joke.
‘I’m sorry, I forgot. In Washington, aren’t they? Mother was American, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ As if he didn’t know.
‘Rotten luck. Well, just sign the bloody thing so we can get on. I can’t brief you until you sign.’
As soon as I’ve signed, Seethrough begins a short lecture about the Service, sparing me what he calls the grisly details but wanting, he says, to give me an outline of where the operation he’s planning fits within the intelligence jigsaw. Seethrough’s fellow Intelligence Branch staff, of whom there are fewer than I imagined, divide their efforts between a number of regional controllerates and another called Global Issues. The combined work of the controllerates is carried out by P and R officers, standing for production and requirements, a division of labour, roughly speaking, between the first half and second half of what is called the intelligence cycle. I’ve already been introduced to the idea in the army during my stint with the Green Slime, as members of the Intelligence Corps are affectionately known on account of their spinach-coloured berets.
Intelligence is broadly described as having four main phases: raw intelligence is first gathered or collected by a variety of means and technologies, then converted or collated into a form useable by analysts. It is then disseminated to the right people at the right time, and finally put to use – or, as we used to joke, misuse – by decision makers. In the army intelligence is used to enhance what military analysts, with their characteristic love of terminology incomprehensible to ordinary people, call battlespace visualisation.
The vocabulary of the Firm is different. I never once hear the words secret or agent. Raw intelligence is used to produce varying grades of CX – finely sifted intelligence reports – for the top feeders in the intelligence food chain. I never find out why it’s called CX, or why intelligence from the Security Service, better known as MI5 and whose members Seethrough calls the River Rats, is called FX. They sound like types of nerve gas to me.
Since its area of specialisation is the use of human assets, the Firm’s officers engage in four parallel tasks: targeting, cultivating, recruiting and then running their assets. Those in the know are said to be indoctrinated; Seethrough’s philosophy is to keep the number of people indoctrinated into an operation to a minimum, and is emphatic that I discuss the material he’s about to show me with no one but himself unless specifically instructed otherwise. My questions, he said, will go to him. My ideas will go to him, and my contact reports will go to him. I’m to write nothing down.
‘This one’s at the request of the Americans,’ he says, opening the uppermost file. ‘Provisional code name is Elixir.’ He pushes the opened file towards me with a laminated companion list of commonly used acronyms and code words with their explanations – from Actor, meaning the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, to Zulu, meaning Greenwich Mean Time. The contents of the file are divided into several sections, which we examine in turn.
The first is a description of three civilian airline crashes. Each plane has dropped out of the sky shortly after take-off, killing all on board. The three incidents have been briefly reported in the press, but none of the photographs I’m looking at has ever made it into the papers. They’re too gruesome. The debris from the first aircraft is strewn over a mile, along with the bodies of 200 passengers, many of whose charred and mutilated remains are still strapped into their seats. The second and third aircraft have crashed into water, and their wreckage has been gathered and secretly reassembled in long and dangerous recovery operations. Here too the passengers have been photographed as they were found, their bloated and limbless corpses still attached to their seats. In each case the accidents have been publicly blamed on engine failure, which official investigations have later confirmed. The most recent of them occurred only a few months ago.
‘Even the airlines don’t know this,’ says Seethrough, ‘but the culprit in all three is the same.’ He turns to another section in the file, and shows me a US Defense Department image of an FIM-92.
Better known by its common name: the Stinger missile.
‘Not a shred of doubt,’ he went on. ‘The Americans have verified it and we’ve double-checked at Fort Halstead. There’s a mac
hine there that can identify the exact stock of explosive from a tiny fragment of wreckage. Stingers in every case.’
At the mention of Fort Halstead I think involuntarily of my strolls with the Baroness through the gardens of Chevening House, and I picture the incongruous-looking palm trees swaying above the rear porch. Fort Halstead, the secret research establishment labelled only as ‘works’ on ordinary maps, is over a mile away at the top of the hill that overlooks the village, but on a still day we could often hear the faint cry of the warning alarm, at the sound of which the Baroness’s finger would rise like a conductor’s in anticipation of the muffled thump of a subterranean explosion. Somewhere in the complex, more recently, white-coated technicians had identified residues of TNT from Stinger warheads, matching its chemical profile against a database of known explosive stocks.
‘Probably by spectrometric analysis of the isotopic ratios,’ I say because I know a thing or two about explosives.
‘Yes, quite,’ agrees Seethrough, looking up for a moment. ‘PTCP reckons they came through Iran but we don’t know for sure. And if you can’t stop the flow, you go back to the source.’
‘Afghanistan. Where we handed them out in the first place.’
‘To your old friends,’ he adds with a dark look.
‘Only some of them.’
‘Now they’re easy pickings for al-Qaeda, and you know what that means.’
‘Yes, I do. In Arabic it means base or capital or seat of operations. But the way you pronounce it, it sounds like al-qa’da, which means buttocks.’
‘I refer,’ says Seethrough, clearing his throat and choosing to overlook this impudence, ‘to the threat, not the etymology.’
The threat is an obvious one. If sufficient of the missiles are acquired by terrorists from Afghans willing to sell them, the potential for chaos and slaughter is impossible to contemplate. Governments will be held to ransom, says Seethrough. Anti-missile technologies are too costly to install on civilian airliners. The only solution is to recover the missiles themselves from the same people they were delivered to fifteen years earlier, when the Afghans were fighting the Soviets.